Der Streitpunkt in der aktuellen Vergütungsdiskussion in Publikumsgesellschaften dreht sich um die Frage, ob die Managementvergütungen durch reine Marktkräfte oder aber durch unternehmensinterne Machtverhältnisse als Ausfluss einer ungenügenden Corporate Governance - determiniert werden. Die hier präsentierte Untersuchung von rund 3/4 aller an der SIX Swiss Exchange kotierten Gesellschaften von 2007 bis 2010 hat zumZ iel, dies dank der neu eingeführten Offenlegungsvorschriften für den Schweizer Kapitalmarkt empirisch zu klären.
This paper presents a new method for the analysis of moral hazard principal-agent problems. The new approach avoids the stringent assumptions on the distribution of outcomes made by the classical first-order approach and instead only requires the agent's expected utility to be a rational function of the action. This assumption allows for a reformulation of the agent's utility maximization problem as an equivalent system of equations and inequalities. This reformulation in turn transforms the principal's utility maximization problem into a nonlinear program. Under the additional assumptions that the principal's expected utility is a polynomial and the agent's expected utility is rational in the wage, the final nonlinear program can be solved to global optimality. The paper also shows how to first approximate expected utility functions that are not rational by polynomials, so that the polynomial optimization approach can be applied to compute an approximate solution to non-polynomial problems. Finally, the paper demonstrates that the polynomial optimization approach extends to principal-agent models with multi-dimensional action sets.
This paper analyzes a capacity-planning and pricing problem of a monopolist facing uncertain demand. The model incorporates .soft. and .hard. capacity constraints (soft constraints can be relaxed at a cost while hard constraints cannot be relaxed) and demand uncertainty. The firm receives additional demand information within the planning horizon. The solution to the planning problem depends crucially on what is known about demand at the time of the capacity decision as well as the pricing decision. Historical acquisition costs of capacity are relevant for pricing whenever the same information is available for capacity planning and pricing. However, when the firm receives additional demand information before making the pricing decision, only marginal cost is relevant for pricing. Different types of capacity constraints, i.e., soft vs. hard, affect how much capacity the firm obtains, but not how the firm sets prices.
We study the role of peer groups in determining the structure and the total amount of executive compensation. Our analysis is based on a standard agency model in which the agent's reservation utility is related to the peer group used for performance evaluation. Our main result is that the informativeness criterion proposed by Holmström (1979) is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for the optimality of a relative performance evaluation. Whenever the relative performance evaluation is positively related to the agent's reservation utility, the principal faces a trade-off between the benefits from improved risk sharing and the total cost of compensation. If the peer group effect is strong, it can be optimal to evaluate the agent on her own firm performance only. If the relative performance evaluation is negatively related to the agent's reservation utility, it can also prove useful to reward the agent on the basis of uninformative signals. We also study the optimal weighting and composition of the performance index and find that the principal puts lower (higher) weight on an index and on peer firms that are positively (negatively) related with agent's reservation utility. In case of a negative relation it can even be optimal to include firms with uncorrelated cash flows into the index in order to reduce the total compensation.
